The day after the visit to The Photographers’ Gallery our eldest said ‘Art’s just chatting.’
We asked her to repeat this so that we could jot it down.
‘Art’s just about conversations. When we were in Denmark you talked to this man and it was really boring for me and M.’
(The trip to Denmark was a Research Fellowship. We spent three weeks visiting galleries and meeting artists who were also parents.) We asked if she could remember any more about this particular boring meeting.
‘I was just sitting in a chair. We weren’t given anything to play with.’
We asked what she thought of the exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery that we’d seen the day before.
‘Good. That was good. Cos we didn’t just have to sit. Liberty’s [the department store] was the best thing yesterday cos there’s so much awesome stuff. Like this giraffe that was this big and everyone wanted to touch it.’
A lot of the work in Home Truths seems more conventional than we’d expected.
Judith expressed it something like this: many works use the familiar trope of connecting childhood with the mother’s body. Many of the photos, Elinor Carucci’s for example, deliver such poise and self-control; they are beautiful and distant from the chaotic experience of life with children.
One piece which seemed to appeal to all six of us, in different ways, was Gazelle by Katie Murray. The film shows a woman trying to use her Gazelle Total Body Workout Exercise Machine (found abandoned on the street and taken home to eliminate the impact of childbirth on Murray’s body) in the living room, urged on by an motivational video featuring a man with a blonde perm and prodigious muscles.
The woman is interrupted by her child. Partly to avoid injuring the child with the swing of the machine, she picks him up and continues her workout. Another child enters and the same thing happens. This is intercut with a nature documentary of two juvenile cheetahs chasing then hanging off a gazelle in their attempt to kill it. At the end of the documentary the gazelle throws off the young cheetahs and runs free. The dramatic peak of the film however is not this final burst for freedom, it is a little earlier, when a man walks through the living room, looks at the woman hung about with children plodding on with her exercise. He slides round the edge of the room, tries to avoid the gaze of the camera, retrieves his bag, looks back, hesitates, puffs out his cheeks, then leaves through the open door.
Our eldest watched for a while then said ‘there’s two cheetah cubs and there’s two children climbing on the mummy’. Our youngest crawled across the floor and lent her hands against the projection.
At The Photographers’ Gallery.
On the train to London, in between passing round snacks and thinking of things to draw, we talked to Judith about artist development schemes in East Anglia. For several years Wysing Arts Centre has been running the Escalator scheme. The scheme was initiated by, and is still funded by, the Arts Council. In the scheme’s current form artists apply to take part in residential retreats at Wysing where they are brought together with students from the Royal College of Art curating course.
Judith pointed out that underlying this model of artist development is the notion of the itinerant artist, the neo-liberal operator, willing to travel to wherever the work presents itself, belonging to a shifting network rather than to a particular place. If the participating artists then make the necessary trips to Manifestavenicekasselistanbul they are likely to cross paths with the by-now-qualified curators they were introduced to at Wysing. A career may take flight.
An alternative to this Permanent Mobility model is to support the development of artists in the places where they live and work. This was the approach pursued for over a decade by firstsite. In the era before it moved into a new-build in Colchester town centre, firstsite as an organisation was committed to meeting artists in Essex and Suffolk, learning about their practice and providing support and opportunities. This support was responsive to the needs of the artist rather than an external view of ‘success’. The philosophy was about creating a vibrant, critically engaged culture within the regions rather than sucking the selected few into a global pot.
A drawing of a train done by our middle daughter whilst on our way to London.
